For as long as I can remember, I’ve yearned to be part of a BFF-ship, like Anne Shirley-Cuthbert searching for her Diana Barry or Nancy Drew seeking her crewmates Bess and George. As I grew, I realized what I really wanted was to be part of something bigger than myself, working toward a common goal and solving problems bravely and creatively. In any given role, I’ve sought to find the best possible team for the job. Now that I’m a full-time creator, I’ve continued to prioritize people and collaborative practice over any given outcome. Sometimes, we win, sometimes we learn. But the important thing is that we try/learn together.
One of my favorite things about sports (and sports stories) for kids—and especially AFAB, queer, and nonbinary kids—is how they teach us to unapologetically take up space. To own our lanes (in derby speak) and support each other physically and emotionally through life’s trials.
As I learned through joining the roller derby community later in life, belonging to a team isn’t just about being “recruited” or “making it” past tryouts. It’s also about learning how to belong in your own skin, rely on your own strengths, and become an indispensable member of your community.
This story perfectly encompasses these lessons in a fun and visual way. I stan!
A graphic novel about friendship, belonging and feeling comfortable in your own skin! Trying out for middle school cheerleader means: performing in the giant school gym, with the whole school watching, and risking total humiliation. If Christina can make it through this, she can make it through anything.
As one of the only Asian American kids in her small Texas town, Christina just wants to fit in. Luckily, her best friend, Megan, who is Iranian American, can totally relate. The two girls have always been inseparable and relish creating elaborate fantasy worlds together.
I grew up in Ottawa, Canada, a child of immigrant parents, and I’ve always been curious about other cultures and far-off places. Moving to Hong Kong gave me the chance to explore my Chinese cultural roots and learn the language. I spent 14 very happy years in Hong Kong and my experiences there were the inspiration for my middle-grade debut, The Not-So-Uniform Life of Holly-Mei. Like the character Holly-Mei, I love dumplings, bubble tea, and field hockey. The books I chose are ones that reflect my experience of being born and raised in a new world.
This story made me reflect on and appreciate the power of names. Twelve-year-old Meilan moves with her family from Boston’s Chinatown to Redbud, Ohio for a fresh start. When the principal insists on changing her name to Melanie, she starts to question her name and its meaning. Her nickname, Lan, has many meanings in Chinese and she tries to fit into all of them: basket – to carry the burden of her family’s stress; blue – to reflect her mood; and mist – to be invisible at school; before cherishing her name’s true meaning: beautiful orchid.
"The little girl I was would have been thrilled to encounter Meilan... having found a character who embraces the complexity of being both Chinese and American, I would have been able to echo her words: 'I am not alone.'" -New York Times Book Review by Jean Kwok
A family feud before the start of seventh grade propels Meilan from Boston's Chinatown to rural Ohio, where she must tap into her inner strength and sense of justice to make a new place for herself in this resonant debut.
Meilan Hua's world is made up of a few key ingredients: her family's…
This is Don’s second short story collection, and the thing I’ve always adored about him is his attention to detail.
Reading him, you instantly know he does his research, especially when it comes to his characters’ jobs. The second story here is “Commis,” and it’s about a cook. After I came to the last page, I felt like I could work at a restaurant. This level of specificity is all over The Partition, as it was in his first collection Yellow, published more than two decades ago.
This is a less hopeful, more mature work than his debut, and it’s all the richer for it.
A thrilling new story collection from acclaimed writer Don Lee exploring Asian American identity, spanning decades and continents
"Don Lee is one of those masterful storytellers who is both classic and modern, who can transport you into any setting, with any character." —The TODAY Show, recommended by author Weike Wang
"The organizing conceit of all [Lee’s] fiction has remained consistent: Asian Americans are not monoliths . . . Lee narrates from a collective perspective, his stories offering a kaleidoscopic vision of all the ways it feels to be yellow." —New York Times Book Review
Interior Chinatown is one of my all-time favorite
novels. It has a personal meaning for
me—through marriage I have ties to Los Angeles’s Chinatown, and Yu captures
that community’s past and present so compellingly.
The book’s main character, Willis Wu, pursues
his dream of becoming a Hollywood leading man, navigating the complexities of
Chinese American life and the pressures of American racism. Through Willis’s struggles, Yu provides a
sharp expose of Hollywood and its stereotypes. By using the format of a script and, at points fusing reality with
fantasy, Yu’s narrative becomes intensively gripping and visual.
This book drops you into Willis Wu’s world
and you feel his frustrations, share his dreams, and experience his
hope.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and adeeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant,…
Every author writing about race and tax in the United States uses my article with William Whitford, “A Black Critique of the Internal Revenue Code.” Using census data, Bill and I showed that blacks and whites who earn the same income, live in the same geographic areas, have the same education and marital status, pay different amounts of federal income tax because of the race and wealth disparities outlined in Race and Wealth Disparities: A Multidisciplinary Discourse edited by Beverly Moran.
I have used this textbook for over ten years. It groups Supreme Court decisions and other writings by Hispanics, Native Americans, Blacks, and Asians in a way that allows students to understand how doctrine shifts over almost three hundred years of jurisprudence. The text gently gets students to expand their knowledge base and confront what they learned (or did not learn) in other courses. I enjoy this textbook every time that I use it.
This casebook presents interdisciplinary, critical perspectives on race and racism and covers the roles of law and history in shaping the meanings of race in the United States. Updates the second edition with new material on: President Obama's election and "post-racialism"; important studies of implicit bias; the Voting Rights Act and allegedly race-neutral restrictions on voting; recurring violence against and harassment of Latino immigrants; book-banning in Arizona; and demographic changes and their implications. Includes new cases such as Shelby County v. Holder and Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, current statistics, and updated references. Features rich historical treatment of…
Born in the Philippines and raised in the US from the age of 4, Renee didn't see the stories of her culture reflected in books until she was a freshman in college at UC Berkeley. Renee wrote her first novel, The Hour of Daydreams, which was inspired by the ghost stories her family told. It received the inaugural Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Finalist award. Her children’s book One Hundred Percent Me is the book she wishes she could’ve read to her own daughters.With her latest book, The ABCs of Asian American History, Renee hopes young readers will celebrate the vast contributions of Asian Americans to US culture, politics, arts, and society.
This young adult novel is one adults too will enjoy.
Told from the lens of a Filipino American teenager who returns to his home country to investigate his cousin’s disappearance, Patron Saints of Nothing provides insightful commentary on the Philippine drug war carried out by the Duterte administration.
This is a complex, multilayered story about family, loss, and forgiveness.
"Brilliant, honest, and equal parts heartbreaking and soul-healing." --Laurie Halse Anderson, author of SHOUT
"A singular voice in the world of literature." --Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down
A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin's murder.
Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs,…
This is a topic that is very passionate for me since growing up in Toronto, and I never had any role models that look like me to look up to. I wanted to showcase powerful Asian women authors to show others what is possible and that we can also dismantle the negative stereotypes we still face. I want to be able to create better representation for Asian women in the media, and highlighting these amazing authors is a great way to showcase that.
This is a great guide for any Asian professional who wants to create more visibility in the workplace. There are great interviews from leaders and tips that you can use in your own journey.
It’s such a timely book for anyone who wants to advance in their career and be seen as a leader in their industry.
Explore the challenges faced by Asian professionals and how to overcome them.
A SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK FESTIVAL AWARD WINNER A NEW ENGLAND BOOK FESTIVAL AWARD WINNER A PINNACLE BOOK AWARD WINNER
"A must-read if you're ready to unlock your full potential!" -Tiffany Pham, Founder and CEO, Mogul
Find your voice, own your story, and elevate your professional life. In The Visibility Mindset: How Asian American Leaders Create Opportunities and Push Past Barriers, Chao and Lam deliver an engaging and enlightening treatment of how Asian American professional leaders have powered through the obstacles in their way. Exploring a variety of myths,…
E. L. Shen is a writer and editor living in New York City. Her debut middle-grade novel, The Comeback (Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers) is a Junior Library Guild Selection, received two starred reviews, and was praised for its “fast-paced prose, big emotions, and authentic dialogue” in The New York Times. Her forthcoming young adult novel, The Queens of New York (Quill Tree Books) was won in a six-figure preempt and is scheduled to publish in Summer 2023.
Told from
multiple points of view, this story details the horrific internment of fourteen
Japanese American teenagers and their families during the height of World War
II. The history of Japanese internment camps is often glazed over in Social
Studies classes in favor of celebrating America’s successes in the war, but I
was taken by Traci’s unflinching portrait of the teenagers’ lives and choices
as they grapple with how to be Asian American in a world that refuses to
acknowledge their citizenship and identities.
Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco. Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted. Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps. In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.
Growing up in a comfortable suburb, I was never encouraged to examine my privilege or to ask questions about our country’s social and economic arrangements. I knew shockingly little about U.S. history beyond the triumphalist narratives of great men and military victories; the dark side of that history usually came in footnotes, and always with the implication that our country’s sins are mere aberrations from its good intentions. I had to learn the most important truths about our history from literature, which shows us the impact that events have on individuals, painting a fuller picture of how America became the country it is, and the terrible price so many people have had to pay.
I moved to San Francisco in 2002 and stayed for almost 15 years, but I knew almost nothing about the Asian American community that has made the city their home for more than a century. I was never taught Asian American history; I never learned about the importation of Chinese labor in the 19th century, or the Chinese Exclusion Act, or the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II. I’d never really thought of Asian Americans as part of the Civil Rights struggle or understood the constant racism they’ve faced. I learned about all of these things from Yamashita’s rich doorstopper of a novel, which brings the San Francisco of the 1960s and 1970s to life more dynamically and inclusively than I’d imagined it before. It’s a wild, kaleidoscopic experience; reading it is like watching history take place in real-time.
Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s. As Karen Tei Yamashita's motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies, and personal turmoil.
The tenth anniversary edition of this National Book Award finalist brings the joys and struggles of the I Hotel to a whole new generation of readers, historians,…
On December 8, 2020, Anthony So died of an overdose. We know he was found cold, in bed, by Alex Torres, So’s partner of seven years; that San Francisco’s official autopsy report determined the cause of death: “gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), methamphetamine, and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA);” and that So was doing massive amount of Adderall in order to hit the deadline for his first book (Afterparties).
One of eleven children of survivors of Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, So grew up in a massive extended Khmer family in Stockton, CA. The pre-book-publication of the stories that make up Afterparties appeared in n+1, The Paris Review, The New Yorker.
They are fantastical and real, funny beyond belief, and dripping with pain, with endings that spiritually amaze. Here’s a final thought about what we know about Anthony So: he would have been a literary superstar. Had he lived.
WINNER OF THE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE AT THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS AND THE FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'So's distinctive voice is ever-present: mellifluous, streetwise and slightly brash, at once cynical and bighearted...unique and quintessential' Sunday Times
'So's stories reimagine and reanimate the Central Valley, in the way that the polyglot stories in Bryan Washington's collection Lot reimagined Houston and Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous allowed us to see Hartford in a fresh light.' Dwight Garner, New York Times
'[A] remarkable debut collection' Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
